“Because he’s been so cruel, so spiteful, so underhanded. I didn’t want my child to be exposed to that influence. I’ve met the present Mrs. Bartsler and her son, Carl, and they are human beings. But Jason considered me as a gold-digging prostitute, lower than the dirt beneath his feet. However, that’s all been settled now … . Well, I guess I hadn’t better say too much.”

  “I don’t think you had,” Mason said. “I’ll ask my questions of Mrs. Brockton.”

  “And you don’t have to tell him a thing,” Helen Bartsler said.

  “Go ahead.”

  Mason said to Mrs. Brockton, “Just what did you know about Robert Bartsler?”

  “She took care of him for me,” Helen Bartsler said. “That is, up to the time Mildred kidnapped him.”

  Mason said, “Really, Mrs. Bartsler, I think it would be better if you wouldn’t answer questions. After all, I’m trying to interview Mrs. Brockton.”

  “You don’t have any right to tell me what to do and what not to do.”

  “How did Mildred Danville get killed?” Ella Brockton asked.

  “Someone shot her in the back of the head.”

  “Ella!” Helen Bartsler exclaimed.

  “She was,” the woman said in the same dogged monotone.

  “How long since you’ve seen the baby?” Mason asked Ella Brockton.

  “I haven’t seen him since Mildred Danville took him away,” the woman said, and this time there was bitter feeling in her voice. “I warned Mrs. Bartsler what would happen. I knew the minute I saw the expression on her face that day that she was going to take the child and … ”

  “I think that’s enough, Ella,” Helen Bartsler said firmly.

  “That,” Mason announced, “suits me. I can get my information elsewhere. Come on, Della, let’s go.”

  They were halfway to the door when Helen Bartsler said, “How did you find out about Robert?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “I already have,” she said with a glint of triumph in her eyes. “I know my rights.”

  “As the surviving widow of Robert Bartsler?”

  “Yes, and also as the wife of a person reported missing in action. In case you’re interested, Mr. Mason, I’ve already patched up my differences with Jason Bartsler and have made a full settlement.”

  “Cash?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Settlement all signed?”

  “It will be as soon as … . Well, I guess I’ll let you find out these things for yourself since you’re so smart!”

  “Thank you, I will. Come, Della, let’s go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, about the time element and where the body was found and things like that. People sometimes ask such questions when a body is found on their premises, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you!”

  “I noticed that. Good night.”

  “Anything else?” Della asked.

  “Oh,” Mason said casually, “you might give him my compliments—and ask him if he’s setting any more traps for us.”

  Chapter 8

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “Some.”

  “Sleep late in the morning. By the way,” he added, his voice sounding almost too casual. “You said Diana gave you her keys. Better let me keep them.”

  “I’m not cold, and a little rain isn’t going to hurt me. I’m dry and warm as toast. Come on. Don’t think you’re going to talk me out of it.”

  “You haven’t got all day, you know,” Della Street reminded him. “The police aren’t going to be that dumb.”

  “What would happen,” Della asked, “if the police caught us in the apartment?”

  “They won’t catch us, because we aren’t going. I take crazy chances at times, but I’m not going to do anything that wild.”

  “But what are you going for, then?”

  “The mailbox,” Mason said. “Remember Helen Bartsler fooled around there? She didn’t drive to Mildred’s apartment just to ring the bell and then drive away. At least, I don’t think she did.”

  “Oh,” Della said. “I get it now. I thought you were going up.”

  “Paul Drake’s men,” Mason said.

  “Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten you had them watching the place.”

  “Apparently written in a hurry,” Mason said, taking the envelope from his pocket, turning it over in his hands, inspecting it under the dashlight. He inserted a lead pencil in under the flap of the envelope. “Wasn’t sealed very well. It’s going to open along the flap.” Mason rotated the pencil, opening the flap of the envelope.

  “Read it here?” Della Street asked.

  “No. We’d better drive on down the street. The police may show up any minute now.”

  Lord, honey! I can’t ever explain what happened. A cop picked me up, charged me with overtime parking and driving without a. license. I told him I had just run down to the store for an hour’s shopping, and had left my purse in the apartment. He said he’d go along with me to get the purse. Oh horrors! But I had to make my bluff good. I went up, opened the door—and there you were, dear, in the bedroom in your undies with your purse on the table. I grabbed your purse before the cop even had a chance to see you, snatched out your driving license and showed it to the flabbergasted cop. While he was looking it over, I closed the bedroom door. Then because I was just terribly late for something, I had to simply tear out of there—and of course, with the cop tailing along beside me, I couldn’t put your purse back, but had to carry it along big as life. Then an hour or so ago, I opened it again—and honey, you must have robbed a bank!

  “What does that mean?” Della asked.

  “I don’t know. And we haven’t time to do any speculating now.”

  “You mean you’re going to go after that diary?”

  “Exactly.”

  “The police will be … ”

  “Not all the police in the city could keep me from making a try. You wait here and if I … ”

  “You can’t do a thing, Della, and … ”

  “You’re just wasting time,” Della pointed out, opening the car door, jumping out into the rain. “Let’s get started.”

  “Hello, Mr. Mason,” Drake’s man said in a low voice.

  “No police yet?” Mason asked cautiously.

  “Not yet.”

  “I can’t understand it. We’re going in. If anyone shows, honk your horn. Twice for just anyone, three times for the cops. If it’s the law, get your car started and be pulling away from the place when you give the signal, and I mean pulling away.”

  “Okay, I got it.”

  “Okay. We’ll cover the place.”

  They found the door of the apartment. Mason inserted the key, snapped back the lock, switched on the lights. “We don’t want to seem furtive about this, Della. It’s one of the things you have to do right out loud if you’re going to get by … . Let’s see, where is the pantry? That looks like it. You raid the cracker box. I’ll take a gander in the bedroom—just a look around … .. Keep your gloves on. They’ll probably fingerprint the place when they get around to it.”

  Della Street opened the door which led to a small kitchen, switched on the lights. Mason went to the bedroom, clicked the light switch, regarded the twin beds thoughtfully. Both had been made, but one was rumpled as though someone had been sleeping on top of the covers. There were two chests of drawers, one dressing table. Mason’s eyes went to the bathroom door. He moved over to it, had his hand on the knob when, from the street came the sound of a short sharp blast on an automobile horn. A second later there was another. Mason waited for the. sound of a third. It didn’t come.

  Mason switched out the lights in the kitchen, ran to join her. “Someone’s coming. We’re probably trapped now, anyway. Here, what’s this up on … Oh Oh!”

  “Is that Carl Fretch?” Della Street whispered.

  “I’m going back to that pantry,” Della whispered, and glided swiftly and silently across the kitchen.

  “Good evening, Sergeant Holcomb,” Mason said, and managed somehow to give a certain casual note to his voice.

  “In person.”

  “I was,” Mason announced, “about to make an inventory”—and then added as Della Street moved up to join him—”with the assistance of my secretary.”

  “I was hoping,” Mason announced, “you’d got over that habit of jumping at conclusions.”

  “Suit yourself,” Mason said.

  “How’d you get in?” Holcomb asked.

  “My client, Diana Regis, gave me the key to her apartment and asked me to do something for her here.”

  “Humph!” Holcomb said. “Her key!”

  “Exactly,” Mason said, “just as I presume you took Mildred Danville’s key and came to take a look around.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “I don’t know. Five minutes, perhaps. Perhaps ten minutes. Why don’t you look around, Sergeant?”

  “I’m looking around,” Holcomb said. “What have you found, anything?”

  “Nothing of any importance.”

  “I don’t like the idea of you being here. How do we know your client gave you a key and told you to come here?”

  “I’ve told you so.”

  “Well,” Holcomb said after a moment’s hesitation, “I told you I didn’t listen to you any more.”

  “Then quit asking me questions,” Mason said.

  The two officers swung toward the bedroom, pushed open the door. A moment later he called out, “Windows open on the fire escape, Sarg. Looks like somebody’s gone down. Hey, you! Come back here. Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  “Guy just getting down the fire escape,” one of the officers shouted, “beat it down the alley.”

  “Don’t stand there with lead in your pants,” Holcomb yelled, “get down and pick him up. What the hell are you standing there gawking at?”

  “Are you,” Mason asked, “by any chance trying to take me into custody?”

  “I don’t know,” Holcomb said. “I do know I’m not going to let you pull any razzle dazzle on me. What have you got in your pockets?”

  “Personal belongings,” Mason said.

  “Who was it got down the fire escape? Your man, Paul Drake?”

  “Well, take the car and look alive,” Holcomb shouted angrily.

  “Jim’s got the car. He’s making a swing around the block. I thought perhaps you’d want some help up here.”

  “Indeed,” Mason observed.

  “Now that there diary,” Sergeant Holcomb went on, “might be evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Evidence that would give us some sort of a lead on who the murderer might have been.”

  “Of course,” Mason pointed out, “neither one of us knows what’s in the diary—assuming that there is a diary, Sergeant.”

  Holcomb frowned, “I don’t know what’s in it, but you might.”

  “We’ll search you, Mason. If you haven’t taken any evidence from here, we’ll let you go.”

  “You say you’re going to search me?” Mason asked incredulously.

  “You’re damn right.”

  “Without a warrant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think not,” Mason said calmly.

  “Wait until Jim gets here,” Holcomb said. “You’ve got away with murder, Mason, and from now on whenever you run up against me, you’re going to get a few jolts.”

  “Try searching me without a warrant,” Mason said, “and you’ll get a jolt yourself.”

  “Jason Bartsler, eh,” Sergeant Holcomb said. “All right boys, impound that car. Shake down the guy that’s casing the place. If Drake sent him over here to keep watch, he saw the guy that went down the fire escape. Get a description. Tell him it’s a burglary rap, and if he withholds essential evidence from the police, we’ll take his license and make it tough for the whole outfit. Frank, you take these two along with you.”

  “May I ask what you intend to do?” Mason asked.

  “You’re damn right you can ask, wise guy,” Sergeant Holcomb said, “because I was about to tell you anyway. You’re under arrest on a charge of burglary, and on a charge of obstructing justice by suppressing evidence. You’re going to jail. Della Street is going to jail. You’re going to be booked. We wouldn’t search you for anything without a warrant—indeed no! But when you’re booked and jailed, you know, you have to be searched. Your belongings are taken away from you, and you’re given a receipt for them. There’s an easy way, and there’s a hard way of doing these things. You like to have them done the hard way. That suits me. Come on, buddy, take ’em along.”

  Chapter 9

  “That all of it, boys?”

  “That’s all of it,” one of the men said.

  “Me, I don’t know nothing,” Sergeant Holcomb said grinning. “I’m just a dumb cop. You’re the smart guy. If you think there’s anything irregular about it, make a squawk to the proper authorities. In the meantime, Mason, don’t think you’re going to play button-button-who’s-got-the-button with evidence in this case. There are ways of getting what we want.”

  “Of course,” Holcomb went on, “if you want to go before a magistrate and have him release you on your own recognizance why that’ll be some time tomorrow morning, and you can go on into a cell and go to bed. But right now, I’m telling you you can be released on your own recognizance. All you’ve got to do is to sign your name and walk out. You’re going to sign it and walk out some time, you may as well do it now and save yourself spending a night in jail. But if you want to have it done all nice and regular, and object to being released irregularly, why just wait until you can walk out with a court order. I don’t give a damn. There’s the door.”

  “Search you?” Mason asked.

  “A matron stripped me to the skin and went through every inch of me.”

  “What did they do with the diary?” Mason asked.

  “There wasn’t any diary.”

  “Didn’t you get it?”

  “Of course I got it,” she said, “and then I heard the signal for the police. There was part of a loaf of bread there. I dug out the inside, put in the diary, kneaded the bread back over the opening I’d made and dropped the half loaf into the garbage pail. Then I went to join you in the doorway where Sergeant Holcomb saw me.”

  “Going to make a try for it?” Della asked.

  “No. That’s what they’ll be expecting us to do as soon as Holcomb checks up with the matron and finds out it wasn’t on you.”

  “You mean they’ll follow us?”

  “Not us,” Mason said. “They’ll put a lot of spotters around that apartment house. They’ll let us go in, and when we come out, they’ll arrest us all over again.”

  “Do they have any right to do that?”

  “No.”

  “Chief, as far as I’m concerned, I … How I hate that man.”

  “The big baboon,” Della Street went on bitterly. “They took him off the Homicide Squad because you made such a monkey of him, and now he’s going in for strong-arm tactics. Won’t they find that diary in the garbage pail?”

  “They may not,” Mason said. “Remember that Carl Fretch beat it down the fire escape. Sergeant Holcomb’s first reaction will be one of stupefied bafflement, then before he decides that you hid the diary some place in the building, he’ll remember the man who got down the fire escape. He’ll reach the conclusion the diary went with him.”

  “Then what?” Della Street asked.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Mason said. “He may think it was one of Paul Drake’s men and try to bring pressure to bear on Paul. He may get Jason Bartsler up out of bed. He may get a lead to Carl Fretch.”

  “Where are we going?” Della Street asked.

  “Home.”

  “You’re not going to do anything about Carl?”

  “No.”

  “Do you suppose Carl knows you were in there?”

  “He may have stuck around long enough to hear some of the conversation with Sergeant Holcomb.”

  “Suppose he knows about the diary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was he after?”

  “That again is something you can’t tell.”

  “It gave me the creeps seeing him tiptoeing toward that bedroom. I wouldn’t want to have been sleeping in there. There was something so menacing about him … . Chief, how did he get a key to that apartment?”

  “When he had Diana Regis’ purse,” Mason said, “he undoubtedly took an imprint of all of the keys in there and had duplicates made.”

  “And why did he do that?”

  “Perhaps just amatory persistence. Perhaps something else.”

  “Night,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That tense rage.”

  “That,” she announced, “should get your mind off of Sergeant Holcomb. Remember to wipe the lipstick off your mouth. Good night, Chief.”

  Chapter 10

  “Hello, Della, did you sleep?”

  “Some. How about you?”

  “Can’t you,” Della Street asked, “get him for false arrest or something of that sort?”

  “Hi, Della,” Drake said, and grinned at Perry Mason. “What the hell have you two been doing?”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t get any sleep last night.”

  “Neither did I,” Mason said.

  “I see your old friend Sergeant Holcomb is messing around, more belligerent than ever. I thought they’d transferred him.”

  “He’s evidently worked his way into the good graces of the powers that be,” Mason said. “What did he do to you, Paul?”

  “Came up and got me out of bed to tell me that one of my operatives was holding out a diary on him, then accused me of having been in Diana Regis’ apartment with you, of having stolen this diary and made my escape out of the window and down the fire escape.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I was too flabbergasted to even get mad,” Drake said. “I guess I finally convinced him, but the sheer surprise of it put me on the defensive enough so I called my operative who had been watching the apartment and asked him what had happened. He’d seen an automobile belonging to Jason Bartsler drive up and park in front of the place and a youngish man approach the outer door of the apartment house with all of the assurance in the world, fit a key to the door and go in. Naturally my operative assumed the man lived there, but because the guy looked in Diana’s mailbox, he got the license number on the car just as a matter of routine. He says the other operative on the job signaled you with two horn blasts.”